jodischneider.com/blog

Here’s an argument made on Twitter:

Difference between cakes and biscuits? When stale, cakes go hard, biscuits go soft. Hence Jaffa Cakes are cakes. (Was official EU ruling).

I just love this example:

1. First, you can find it with “hence” (see cue phrases from an appendix to Marcu‘s thesis).
2. Second, the notion of this EU (tax) ruling amuses me.
3. Third, it shows that 140 characters is enough for a complex argumentative structure. This has three main claims: When stale, cakes go hard, biscuits go soft; Jaffa Cakes are cakes; and [Jaffa Cakes are cakes due to] official EU ruling.
4. Enthymemes anyone?

It’s hard, though, to draw the line between an argument and an explanation in this context.
Jaffa Cakes, for you North American readers, are a common dessert-y snack in Ireland and the UK. Vaguely like Kandy Kakes found in the Philadelphia area/East Coast, but usually have an orange filling.

I’ve been digging SoundCloud lately.

Today I noticed time-based comments in their tracks. It’s a bit disorienting to have comments pop up as you’re listening. Maybe after adjusting, there’s a pleasant sense of having a conversation going on around you. Definitely feels like you’ve got company!

Comments pop up as the track plays

Avatars appear below the track to indicate that there are comments, and you can scroll over avatars to read comments. You can also hide the comments if you prefer.

Entering a comment from the timeline

Avatar icons appear in the overview

Example track due to Duncan.

A few weeks ago, I noticed something new on YouTube: an “I dislike this” button.

I wonder how long that’s been there?

When I talk about online argumentation, a frequent comment is “too bad there’s only +1 and Like; we need more expressivity”.

See related discussions:

• Misusing like
• Mood classification on GetSatisfaction
• Using reactions instead of comments on blogs

Loro Aroyo gave a talk in DERI on Friday, based on her “Crowdsourcing community science” slide deck. She was in town for Smita‘s viva. This is a deck of interest to anybody in digital cultural heritage.

The slide on “Ways to use the crowd” seemed particularly useful to me:

• tagging & classification
• editing & transcribing
• contextualising
• acquisition
• co-curation
• crowdfunding

What are the laws of information? Frank van Harmelen proposes seven laws of information science in his keynote to the Semantic Web community at ISWC2011.¹

1. Factual knowledge is a graph.²
2. Terminological knowledge is a hierarchy.
3. Terminological knowledge is much smaller³ than the factual knowledge.
4. Terminological knowledge is of low complexity.⁴
5. Heterogeneity is unavoidable.⁵
6. Publication should be distributed, computation should be centralized to decrease speed: “The Web is not a database, and I don’t think it ever will be.”
7. Knowledge is layered.

I wish every presentation came with this sort of summary: slides and transcript, presented in a linear fashion. But these laws deserve more attention and discussion–especially from information scientists. So I needed something even punchier to share, (prioritized thanks to Karen).

1. He presents them as “computer science laws” underlying the Semantic Web; yet they are laws about knowledge. This makes them candidate laws of information science, in my terminology. [↩]
2. “The vast majority of our factual knowledge consists of simple relationships between things,
   represented as an ground instance of a binary predicate.
   And lots of these relations between things together form a giant graph.” [↩]
3. by 1-2 orders of magnitude [↩]
4. This is seen in “the unreasonable effectiveness of low-expressive KR”: ”the information universe is apparently structured in such a way that the double exponential worse case complexity bounds don’t hit us in practice.” [↩]
5. But heterogeneity is solvable through mostly social, cultural, and economic means (algorithms contribute a little bit). [↩]

Yesterday I overheard two guys talking in the grocery store:

I am more of a John Lennon than you are.

The response?

My hair has more volume, therefore I am.

A brief, informal argument. Halloween-themed, I presume.

Today the DERI Reading Group starts up again for the fall. I’m talking about three papers from the IMPACT project.

For now this is just to provide my colleagues with links; check back later for slides, etc.Scroll down for slides and video.

1. Adam Wyner and Tom van Engers. A Framework for Enriched, Controlled On-line Discussion Forums for e-Government Policy-making. EGOVIS 2010. AcaWiki Summary
2. Adam Wyner, Tom van Enger, and Kiavash Bahreini. From Policy-making Statements to First-order Logic. Electronic Government and Electronic Participation 2010. AcaWiki Summary
3. Adam Wyner and Tom van Enger. Towards Web-based Mass Argumentation in Natural Language. (long version of this EKAW 2010 poster). AcaWiki Summary

Reading Group talk: Using Controlled Natural Language and First Order Logic to improve e-consultation discussion forums from Jodi Schneider on Vimeo.



When the topic of discussion changes, how do you indicate that? Tender Support seems clunky in some ways, but their forking mechanism helps conversations stay focused on their topic:

Forking with Tender Support

Lately forking has also been on my mind as the Library Linked Data group edits and reorganizes our draft report: wiki history and version control is helpful, but insufficient. What I miss most is a “fork” feature, where you could temporarily take ownership of a copy (socially, this indicates that something is a possibility, rather than the consensus; technically, it indicates provenance, would allow “show all forks of this”, and might help in merge changes back). Perhaps naming and tagging particular history items in MediaWiki could help address this, but I think really I want something like git.

I’ve seen a few examples of writing and editing prose with git; I’d like to get a better understanding of the best practices for making collaborative changes in texts with distributed version control systems. Surely somebody’s written up manuals on this?

GetSatisfaction does so many things right. Smart, immediate feedback is one example.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed this message while adding a post:
“EASE UP ON THE ALL CAPS IN YOUR TITLE. It looks like you’re shouting”

This is great in several ways:

1. It’s immediate.
2. It makes a single, clear, personalized¹ suggestion.
3. It uses a familiar analogy (“shouting”) — helping to explain the perceived problem.
4. It’s not enforced: this nudges the poster, but leaves them to make up their own mind.
5. It hints at humor/puts the shoe on the other foot (by USING CAPS FOR THE START OF THE MESSAGE).
6. It’s not overwhelming.

Like their mood feedback it’s lightweight and appears to be effective.

1. i.e. specific to the situation [↩]

We’ve extended the STLR 2011 deadline due to several requests; submissions are now due May 8th.

JCDL workshops are split over two half-days, and we are lucky enough to have *two* keynote speakers: Bernhard Haslhofer of the University of Vienna and Cathy Marshall of Microsoft Research.

Consider submitting!

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
The 1st Workshop on Semantic Web Technologies for Libraries and Readers

STLR 2011

June 16 (PM) & 17 (AM) 2011

http://stlr2011.weebly.com/
Co-located with the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2011 Ottawa, Canada

While Semantic Web technologies are successfully being applied to library catalogs and digital libraries, the semantic enhancement of books and other electronic media is ripe for further exploration. Connections between envisioned and emerging scholarly objects (which are doubtless social and semantic) and the digital libraries in which these items will be housed, encountered, and explored have yet to be made and implemented. Likewise, mobile reading brings new opportunities for personalized, context-aware interactions between reader and material, enriched by information such as location, time of day and access history.

This full-day workshop, motivated by the idea that reading is mobile, interactive, social, and material, will be focused on semantically enhancing electronic media as well as on the mobile and social aspects of the Semantic Web for electronic media, libraries and their users. It aims to bring together practitioners and developers involved in semantically enhancing electronic media (including documents, books, research objects, multimedia materials and digital libraries) as well as academics researching more formal aspects of the interactions between such resources and their users. We also particularly invite entrepreneurs and developers interested in enhancing electronic media using Semantic Web technologies with a user-centered approach.

We invite the submission of papers, demonstrations and posters which describe implementations or original research that are related (but are not limited) to the following areas of interest:

• Strategies for semantic publishing (technical, social, and economic)
• Approaches for consuming semantic representations of digital documents and electronic media
• Open and shared semantic bookmarks and annotations for mobile and device-independent use
• User-centered approaches for semantically annotating reading lists and/or library catalogues
• Applications of Semantic Web technologies for building personal or context-aware media libraries
• Approaches for interacting with context-aware electronic media (e.g. location-aware storytelling, context-sensitive mobile applications, use of geolocation, personalization, etc.)
• Applications for media recommendations and filtering using Semantic Web technologies
• Applications integrating natural language processing with approaches for semantic annotation of reading materials
• Applications leveraging the interoperability of semantic annotations for aggregation and crowd-sourcing
• Approaches for discipline-specific or task-specific information sharing and collaboration
• Social semantic approaches for using, publishing, and filtering scholarly objects and personal electronic media

IMPORTANT DATES

*EXTENDED* Paper submission deadline: May 8th 2011
Acceptance notification: June 1st 2011
Camera-ready version: June 8th 2011

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

• Bernhard Haslhofer of the University of Vienna
• Cathy Marshall of Microsoft Research

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Each submission will be independently reviewed by 2-3 program committee members.

• India Amos, Textist, Design Editor at Jubilat, USA
• Emmanuelle Bermes, Centre Pompidou Virtuel, France
• Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems Inc., USA
• Uldis Bojars, National Library of Latvia, Latvia
• Peter Brantley, Internet Archive, USA
• Dan Brickley, Vrije University Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Guillaume Cabanac, University of Toulouse, France
• Tyng-Ruey Chuang, Acamedia Sinica, Taiwan
• Paolo Ciccarese, Harvard Medical School, USA
• Tim Clark, Harvard Medical School, USA
• Liza Daly,Threepress Consulting Inc., USA
• Kai Eckert, Mannheim University Library, Germany
• Tudor Groza, University of Queensland, Australia
• Michael Hausenblas, DERI, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland
• Antoine Isaac, Vrije University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Piotr Kowalczyk, Poland
• Brian O’Leary, Magellan Media Partners, USA
• Steve Pettifer, University of Manchester, UK
• Ryan Shaw, University of North Carolina, USA
• Ross Singer, Talis, USA
• William Waites, Open Knowledge Foundation, UK
• Rob Warren, University of Waterloo, Canada

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

• Alison Callahan, Dept of Biology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
• Dr. Michel Dumontier, Dept of Biology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
• Jodi Schneider, DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland
• Dr. Lars Svensson, German National Library

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Please use PDF format for all submissions. Semantically annotated versions of submissions, and submissions in novel digital formats, are encouraged and will be accepted in addition to a PDF version.

All submissions must adhere to the following page limits:
Full length papers: maximum 8 pages
Demonstrations: 2 pages
Posters: 1 page

Use the ACM template for formatting: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html

Submit using EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=stlr2011